She wasn't able to flee to freedom, she was escorted to the parole authorities by the perpetrator of kidnap, rape, enslavement. The appointment was the result of a single serendipitous act of imagination by a campus police officer.

The officer would not have been high in the hierarchy of law enforcement, but by thinking about the bizarre presentation of 58-year-old Phillip Garrido, who had a record of sex crime going back to the 1970s, with two little girls, the officer did something that was both ordinary and extraordinary.

Checking out Garrido and then reporting him to his parole officer triggered events that illuminate classic characteristics that confound detection.

Perpetrators of kidnapping and sexual crime have to tell themselves a story – a narrative to normalise the transgression, to exonerate the perpetrator, to implicate or blame the victim.

We've known this since 1984 when David Finkelhor's research on sex offenders revealed their imperative to re-interpret the process of capture, to translating every gesture, every garment, every flick of an eyelid as endorsement of encouragement.

But the work of investigation is confounded by the perpetrator's resolve: these offences command audacious strategy and militaristic planning. They require the submission, distraction or confusion of anyone recruited into the narrative.

The perpetrator's domain is often a landscape whose eccentricity defies curiosity. From the Wests to Josef Fritzl's imprisonment of his own daughter, to the kidnap of Natasha Kampusch, the victims lived in surburban fortresses that simultaneously attract and distract attention.

Becalmed or stupefied or utterly subordinated women become part of the disguise. In this case, it seems, Garrido's wife was part of the abduction. All of the women are under control. Even the most notorious of all, Myra Hindley, was a lieutenant to omnipotence.

Detection depends on community intelligence – unlike elaborate corporate fraud or corruption, there is no paper trail, but there is something somewhere that someone notices, there is community intelligence which often fails to attract the respect that attaches to forensic – "scientific" – because it is inevitably subjective. That doesn't make it dodgy, it can only ever be so, because it, too, depends on the community's own imagination and interpretation.

And finally there is the victim. The great child psychiatrist Roland Summit once said that the only person besides the perpetrator who needs to keep the crime secret is the victim. Survival at first requires them to endure the unendurable, then the transition from victim to survivor means mobilising the strength it took to survive the horror to sustain a new life – not by banishing the past but by becoming more than her past.

The challenge confronts both the suffering individual and her society. She cannot come to know herself unless it does, too.

Natasha Kampusch's tragedy – she has become a maligned hermit – exposes Austria as a dysfunctional society.

Like the survivor of war or natural disaster, the victim of kidnap and sexual crime needs the society that failed to rescue her to have the grace to empathise with her complications, to offer her the community respect without which she can't be expected to flourish.